Streaming Analysis of Discourse Participants

Inferring attributes of discourse participants has been treated as a batch-processing task: data such as all tweets from a given author are gathered in bulk, processed, analyzed for a particular feature, then reported as a result of academic interest. Given the sources and scale of material used in these efforts, along with potential use cases of such analytic tools, discourse analysis should be reconsidered as a streaming challenge. We show that under certain common formulations, the batchprocessing analytic framework can be decomposed into a sequential series of updates, using as an example the task of gender classification. Once in a streaming framework, and motivated by large data sets generated by social media services, we present novel results in approximate counting, showing its applicability to space efficient streaming classification.